The book, published by Simon & Schuster last year, provides Donahue's view of social development past, present and future and uses Bethlehem as an example of industrial America's boom town gone bust. In painting his picture of the Christmas City, Donahue chooses colors a bit too bleak for the mayor's liking.

"I'd like to know where all these boarded-up buildings are," Marcincin said yesterday in collecting the thoughts he will send to the host of the popular syndicated interview show "Donahue."

In a chapter on American cultural and industrial development called "The Promised Land," the author cites Bethlehem's development as an example of "a cultural evolution that we ourselves have shaped" - and that we had better shape differently in the future if we expect to avoid the pitfalls experienced by the steel industry.

Donahue feels that the 1741 Moravian settlement based on a social system that "sounds to us today suspiciously like communism" worked well for about a hundred years, until the mid-19th century when a small iron-rail company benefited from "one of the great technological breakthroughs' ' of the century: the devel- opment of steelmaking, and became the Bethlehem Steel Corp.

If Bethlehem the city gets a raw deal in the book as Marcincin contends, Bethlehem the steel company fares much better:

"If you think Bethlehem Steel is just another steel company, you're wrong," Donahue writes. "It's an American monument. Bethlehem Steel built Madison Square Garden, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and the first American aircraft carrier. . . . In achieving these milestones, it replaced the Moravian Church as the focus of life in Bethlehem."

The holy experiment turned into an economic one, and "the religious, communistic culture of the Moravians gradually evolved into the individualistic, entrepreneurial culture of industrial America," Donahue writes.

He goes on to say that the industrial revolution that followed gave work to the influx of immigrants, but he also notes that the unskilled workers suffered conditions that "weren't just the result of unique cruelty or greed: they were part of the industrial culture" of the time.

Then comes the part to which Marcincin takes exception: "If you walk the streets of Bethlehem today, you feel like you're in one of those Western mining towns just before the last resident packed up and left. If this (industrial) culture isn't dying, it's very sick. You can see the boarded- up shop windows, the idle workers, the deserted streets and stores," Donahue writes.

He notes that the steelworks is "half closed down" with thousands of workers having been laid off and with dim prospects of being called back.

Marcincin could hardly argue with this portrait of the situation at the steel company, since he's been using a similar rendering for years to help explain the economic difficulties his administration has faced. But, he insists, the "ghost town" picture the reader gets of boarded-up buildings, idle workers and deserted streets is a bit unfair.

Always the optimist, Marcincin says that in general laid-off steelworkers are not standing idly about the city streets, and while business could always be better, things are picking up in the retail sector. He says diversification is helping to make up employment losses in the city's predominant industry.

"I'm going to invite him to come back to Bethlehem and take a hard look at our industrial parks" and growing commercial and residential development, Marcincin said of the letter that should be sent some time this week.

Donahue goes on to discuss the problem - illustrated by Bethlehem but applying in a much broader sense to American cities and society as a whole - with a Harvard professor who says the mistake is in failing to adapt properly to increasing competition from overseas.

Dr. Robert Reich believes American industry can't compete with low-cost labor and newer technology represented by Japan and other competitors. Rather, Donahue says of Reich's theory, the United States "can only stay ahead by shifting into new, more sophisticated industries where our more highly educated population continues to give us the economic edge."

As countries like South Korea and Brazil overtake Japan's ability to lead markets by virtue of their own advantage in labor costs - even over Japan - the Japanese have adapted not by subsidizing their industries but by moving into "even more mature" industries. From textiles to steel and synthetic fibers, and from steel to steel technology, according to the book.

"In other words," Donahue concludes, "we need to be more adap- tive, not less, if we don't want Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and maybe even America itself to get left behind on the scrap heap of cultural evolution."